Jan Yip

“He said things were going from bad to worse and he was quite right, of course . . . but it doesn't help to be miserable; it doesn't make things right to keep on grieving over them. It clouds the sun, that's all.”
― D.E. Stevenson, Vittoria Cottage

“Too much had to be fitted into youth: learning, growing, preparing, shaping. You went through it all, pushed, urged, encouraged or bullied by your elders; you went through it blindly and without any sense that the years were slipping away. And suddenly you came home and found that you were twenty-one and grown up. Perhaps other girls reached this stage of awareness earlier; she couldn't tell. For herself, it was enough to understand that childhood was over, and that it had been a time of great happiness. The bad times went unremembered, the memory of the good times endured.”
― Elizabeth Cadell, Six Impossible Things

“When you’re sad, don’t try to hold it in. It’s okay to cry a lot. The tears are there because you’ve got to go on living. You’re going on living, which means there’ll be more things to cry about. They’ll come at you from all sides. So don’t ever try to hide from the sadness… that’s what it means to live.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“Forget any of the rose-tinted idiots banging on about your wedding being the happiest day of your life. Weddings are a long, rain-drenched nightmare when the only sounds are your relatives venomously hissing in dark corners.”
― Jodi Taylor, The Nothing Girl